A recent customer was confused about what we had told her when she called about a broken piece of glass. It seems she had a broken piece of glass in one of the windows at her home. She asked if we “repaired” broken glass. We told her that glass cannot be repaired once fully broken but that we could “replace” the broken glass with new glass in her window. To us we were to replace the broken glass. What she heard was that we were going to have to replace her entire window….frame, glass and all! She was concerned with the price we had given her because it was so much less than another price she had received to replace the entire window. She felt that we had either given her a price for an inferior product (due to the lower cost) or that the other company was taking advantage of her. Basically there was a semantics problem in that the same words meant different things to her and us. I suspect that happens to most of us from time to time when hearing the same thing as others but coming to a different understanding of what was meant.

I once read that being understood is really hard work. In this instance it was true!